Free MIT Engineering Text For Download

An anonymous reader writes " The (sci-tech) Library Question is reporting, "The third edition of A Heat Transfer Textbook, written by John H Lienhard V (MIT) and John H Lienhard IV (U Houston), has been made available on the web. The book is an introduction to heat transfer, geared towards engineering students. It may be downloaded free of charge. The authors explain: We are placing a mechanical engineering textbook into an electronic format for worldwide, no-charge distribution. The aim of this effort is to explore the possibilities of placing textbooks online -- effectively giving them away. Two potential benefits should accrue from doing this. First, in electronic format, textbooks can be continually corrected and updated, without the delays inherent in printed books (second and later editions are typically published on a five-year cycle). Second, free textbooks hold the potential for fundamentally altering the economics of higher education, particularly in those environments where money is scarce."

Is there a solutions manual?

[Anonymous Coward]

I downloaded the textbook and it looks real good. I wish I could do the problems and know if I got the right answer or not. Wait, no professor on earth would be able to use this textbook then. Damn.

Re:beneficial in more ways than one

[Anonymous Coward]

The need to carry around excessively heavy textbooks is one of the rare forms of physical excercise that many of us CS students get. IMHO, this excercise may be, contrary to intuition, more vital to us than many of us realize.

Maybe to compensate for the lack of that excercise, it would be good if someone invented a way to associate a physical challenge/cost to each download of an electronic textbook. I'm thinking about something like an excercise bicycle that would have a built-in private key pair and that would produce unique, signed tokens at each revolution of the pedals. These tokens would then be required and consumed by the site providing the textbooks for download, in an amount respective to the size of the download in pages or kilobytes. Of course, the manufacturer of the bike would have to submit the public key of the bike to the publisher of the electronic textbooks.

Re:beneficial in more ways than one

[Mad Marlin]

It would also eliminate the need to carry around excessively heavy textbooks which often lead to back pain and other detrimental health issues.

Unless one of your courses requires you to carry around the entire Encyclopedia Britainnica, you really need to start working out.

Good for Science books, maybe not for History.

[MacDork]

• Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. Since the beginning of your life, since the beginning of the Party, since the beginning of history, the war has continued without a break, always the same war.

Take one part secure eBook format, one part trusted computing, and one part extensible markup. Mix vigorously and serve with a side of Freedom fries.